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Their author cared little for the externals of Australian life except in so far as they helped to tell something, especially something good, of his leading personages. His interest in them was not semi-scientific, like that of Thackeray or Jane Austen, Howells or Henry James, in their studies of human nature; it was that mainly of a sympathiser and a partisan.
Lucy found a new and engrossing amusement, of a semi-scientific kind, in laying down and pressing her botanical specimens, and writing Latin names under the same, being advised thereto and superintended by Hector Macdonald. Flora was so sunny by nature that she lightened up the place around her wherever she went; she was thus in some measure independent of the sun.
For the primitive in man is a beast whom it is hard to chain nor does humanism with its semi-scientific, semi-sentimental laudation of all natural values produce that exacting mood of inward scrutiny in which self-control has most chance of succeeding. Hence here, as elsewhere on the continent, and formerly in China, in Greece and in Rome, a sort of neo-paganism has been steadily supplanting it.
"I humbly crave your honour's pardon," said Peter, "but it is not the scientific but the semi-scientific who do the mischief. Science is one of those poisons of which a good deal cures but a little kills." "Well, well, let us go on with the rest. What is that slender little bundle over there?" "That is the report of the lessee of the opal mines.
"She will tell him all" he thought "And with his strange semi-religious, semi-scientific notions, it will be easy for her to persuade him to marry the girl to this demented creature who fills the house with his shouting 'There shall be no more wars! I should never have thought her capable of tolerating such a crime!"
Long before the game at football was suggested, they had obtained leave of absence from the captain, and, loaded with game-bags, a botanical box, and geological hammer, and a musket, were off along the coast on a semi-scientific cruise. Young Singleton carried the botanical box and hammer, being an enthusiastic geologist and botanist, while Fred carried the game-bag and musket.
Perhaps some of you may be inclined to smile if I use the word "sorcery," but at the present day, under one name or another, scientific or semi-scientific, it is nothing but the old-world sorcery which is trying to find its way among us as the hidden power. Sorcery is the inverted use of spiritual power. That is the definition of it, and I speak upon authority.
Feared we may be by some; respected I doubt not by many others; but really liked, I am sure, by very few." Still more outspoken was an article significantly entitled "The Darkness over Egypt," which appeared on the eve of the Great War. Its publication in a semi-scientific periodical for specialists in Oriental problems rendered it worthy of serious attention.
One which appeared in The Times, over the signature of an amateur reasoner of some celebrity at that date, attempted to deal with the matter in a critical and semi-scientific manner. An extract must suffice, although the curious can see the whole letter in the issue of the 3rd of July.
Hugh's mind was precise enough; but these terse biographies, these books of travel, these semi-scientific stories seemed to Hugh only to relate the things that he did not want to know.
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